Public lecture: Weighing Stars

Rijksmuseum Boerhaave and the Lorentz Center together organize the public lecture ‘Weighing Stars’ by Fabian Schneider on Thursday 22 November 2018.

Since the dawn of mankind, people looked into the night sky and wondered what stars are. Stars told people when to saw and when to harvest and also how to navigate across seas.

Today, we know that stars are cosmic powerhouses that have transformed the pristine Universe into the one we live in today. For example, stars were responsible for the re-brightening of the Universe after the Dark Ages and have produced most of the chemical elements on Earth such as the oxygen we breathe in everyday or the iron in our blood.

The key for understanding the evolution and final fates of stars is their mass. But how do we measure these masses and why are they so important? Fabian Schneider will take you on a journey to the stars and explore what the mass has to do with whether a star will explode in a supernova or not.